So, when you’re standing, the first thing you can start doing to start easing your foot problems is to practice your standing.  Now, this one you can do in the grocery line.  You can do this when you’re waiting anywhere, waiting for somebody.  Just practice your standing.

Now, let me show you a couple of things that also happen because a lot of us either tend to be in our heels or on our toes.  We don’t have even pressure forward-to-back, and if we are one of those people that puts into the back, what the body is going to do to shift is I’m going to push my hips forward.  You’re going to get this kind of look.  Does this look familiar to some people?  Exaggerated, very exaggerated.  My chiropractor’s like, “I’ve seen that a million times.”  Yeah.  This is how it starts to happen.  The weight’s back in the heels, and then everything has to push forward.  So, not only do we have to worry about this whole thing going on.  Now, we’ve got to worry about this whole thing going on.

Second thing, some people are way forward here.  If I’m way forward, my body’s going to do this.  Now, I’ve got to readjust so that I can stay upright.  I’m putting all my pressure forward, and it’s pressing me forward now.

So, when we’re thinking about those three points, yes, we’ve got to be balanced.  That way, we’re going to balance front-to-back.  When we’re going be balanced front-to-back, as we do that to find this person, and I’m supinating out, as soon as I start to pull this back up and I get even, I’m going to find my pressure pushing in keeping me grounded.  I’m going to lift right on up through my spine.  That’s not me doing effort. A lot of people are going to be like, “This is I get my posture.  I squeeze my shoulders back, and I puff my chest out.  That makes me taller.”  No, if you just correct these little things, it will naturally pull you right on up, and you don’t even have to worry about shifting your spine and all these other ways they tell you to get your posture.  Makes sense?

Anybody got any questions thus far?  Just want to make sure you’re with me.  Let me know if you’re not.

So, as we find our balance when we’re standing, we find those points that I mentioned, the V point, and then we just find that front-to-back place.  That’s your first thing. Start practicing your standing.  You’re probably not going to be able to do this for long periods of time.  This is going to be like a hold it for a minute, let the body go, try it again later.  As you start to get more strength and find that foot supporting and the body structure holding you again, then you’ll find that you’ll be able to hold it longer.  It will temporarily fatigue you, but in the long run, it will help you get more endurance and stamina.  Why is this?  When we’re doing these things that are out of balance, the pronation and all of these things, we fatigue the muscles.  Your endurance goes down.  Your stamina goes down.

For my athletes, if you’ve got problems with your feet, this is going to make you a lot more tired during the day.  Those of you that stand on your feet a lot, it’s going to make you get tired a lot faster during the day.  If you fix these problems, the fatiguing stops happening because all of the muscles start working together. I like to say, it’s like getting more to join the party.  You don’t want less to join the party.  You want more to join the party.  Instead of one or two muscles doing all the work, you want 50 muscles doing the work.  Think about how much stronger you are.  Think of how much more active you’re going to be that way, and think of how much endurance and stamina you’ll have.

As you’re going finding this balance and you get this place, understand, initially, you’re not going to be able to hold it long because the muscles don’t know how to hold it.  It’s going to be like a workout for them.  It’s going to get fatigue, and they’re going to be like, “Okay.  I need to go back”.  Then, you work them again, and as you continue to work them, you’ll be able to hold them for longer and longer periods of time.  You’ll start to find that as you’re standing, you’ll have less pain as you stand.  You’ll have that achiness start to go away, and you’ll be able to hold a little bit longer.  So, standing is the first place you can start practicing, and you can do it anywhere.

Second thing we can talk about is your walking.  I do not recommend doing this in public at first because if you have ever tried to change your walk, it does not look natural.  Let me tell you.  I’m going to tell you to change your walk, and you’re going to start doing this.  I don’t think you want to be doing that in public in front of people.  It could be awkward.

I’ll do that if I have to. 

Do it a half mile a day.

You try to change, and it looks at you so odd because you’re trying to [17:16]

It’s not natural, and almost 99% of the people, when they start changing their walk, it does not look natural because when we start thinking about something you’ve done so long on that subconscious level, your body just goes I don’t know what to do and it looks awkward.  So, do it in the privacy of your own home until you get comfortable with it and can figure it out.

When you’re walking, there’s a couple of things we have going on here.  Naturally, because of our shoes, our shoes cause a lot of problems.  Naturally, when we start to walk, the shoes have been built to make us not walk naturally.  So, our bodies have been trained to make us not walk naturally, and shoes are big, big, big problem and a big reason for this.  Shoes and athletics only really started coming around, the soled shoes, really started coming around in the 1970s.  This is when Nike came together.  They started putting thicker soles for athletes.  Before that, most athletes wore very, very thin-soled shoes and did more barefoot-type stuff.  It’s only really in the last 30-some years that shoes in athletics have really gotten bulky, and then they put all these different things in it. What they really had to do when they started putting these cushionings in and raising the heel, which, as you see, the heel is raised, which is unnatural to the body.  As the heel became raised, they had to put all these supports into the arch to counterbalance so it didn’t throw you off, throw you forward.

So, all these shoes out there, arch support or these other shoes that talk about air cushions, they’ve gotten really bulky and gotten really big.  They’re the most unnatural to the body.  They don’t actually contact or allow your feet to be the spring that they’re supposed to be.  Feet are shock absorbers to the body.  When this is doing all the shock absorbing for you and creating an unnatural, many times it causes more shock to the body, and I’m going to explain why here.  We’re going to look at a couple of things.  Heel is raised, so this is going to cause you to strike fairly hard into the heel. When you strike fairly hard into the heel, this can go for runners, see how flexed my ankle is.  I have just taken a lot of energy and a lot of force and put it right into the body.  Now, all this force comes up through the body.

Naturally, when we walk there is a little bit of a heel strike.  There is a softness to it, hopefully a softness, although some of us don’t.  We all got our different walks.  We’ll talk about it, but that big strike right there is putting a lot of force.  The ankle’s not moving.  That’s because the shoes naturally been made to make that happen to you.  That raised heel causes that kind of reaction.  All that cushioning was put in there to try make your body not have shock, to be a shock absorber.  In reality, what it does is it does the opposite.  So, that heel’s been raised.

Second thing we can look at here.  See how the toe goes up?  I don’t know.  Does anybody have toes that do this?  Do your toes look like that? No.  They want to touch the ground.  This is part of reality.  The feet want to touch the ground.  Those toes are meant to do something.  They’re not just supposed to be up in the air, hanging out, doing little things, waving to people.  The toes are meant to be on the floor.  They’re meant to ground you.  So, the shoe naturally creates this rolling action, which our feet should roll, except what it’s doing is making it an unnatural rolling action because it makes that really hard strike.  Then, what happens is, most of us, because of this raised toe, we don’t roll through our toes.  We actually end up not using any of our toe.  We keep our ankle really hard, and we don’t roll.

Now, this is a pretty stiff walk, right?  Again, everything I do is exaggerated.  This is not what you look like. You look like some version of this but not like this.  So, this is how most people walk.  If I’ve got my front forward people.  See how hard that is on the body?  There’s not naturalness to it.  Now, you may not look like this yet, but there’s probably some version of this stiffness that happened to your walk.

Last thing, see these soles?  There’s no bend in these babies.  How much of your soles?  That thing isn’t going anywhere, and I’m a pretty strong girl.  Wait, I might get it.  There’s no bend to these soles so you don’t have that ability for your foot to maneuver in the way that it should or to spread and open in the way that it should, to have that contact, that groundedness.

So, I have some shoes that I like, and the reason why I like them is, although this has a little bit of the toe, it’s not that much.  Notice the heel’s not that high.  You want the heel that helps a lot.  Try to avoid the shoes that have a really high toe.  See how much give these things have?  Why I like them is because they have a lot of give.  They’re very natural.  I can feel the ground underneath me.  They’re very nice to have, those type of shoes.

In a moment, I’m going to talk about the minimalist shoes, which I’m a big proponent of, but I want to talk about the walk.  I want to show you one of those soles that are hard and a sole that’s a little bit less hard.  When we walk, as we’re moving through, we have to consider our points.  This is where it gets a little tricky because now we’ve got take that all those things we learned from standing and bring it over to our walk.  Remember those points of contact.  When we walk, we have to make sure we keep those points of contact.  What we’re going to notice is, for those of us that have that rolling out, we’re going to wear on the outside of our feet because we walk on the outside of our feet.  Those of us that have that pronation, we’re going to find that front of the big toe, you’re going to have some wear going on in there.

You’re going to find that balance again.  Look at your shoes and look at the wear pattern.  It’s going to tell you, when you walk, what do you like to do.  You’re going out.  You’re going in.  So, the first thing you got to do in your walk is get that balance.  Get that place that when you walk, you’ve got the points, the V points.  That’s the first place.